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Topics

Formatting dates and times is one of those common tasks we all have to do in almost every app. Today we'll take a look at how to use Foundation's solution for this: DateFormatter.

DateFormatters are incredibly powerful. Their core purpose is transforming Dates into Strings and Strings into Dates. They handle things like localization for us under the hood. Let's try one out.

We'll create a new formatter:

letformatter=DateFormatter()

Then we'll need to set a "format" on it. This is a string of characters that represent the date we're going to try to parse or render. Often these appear as one or more repeated series of letters like:

formatter.dateFormat="MMM yyyy"

To see a rendered date string using this format, we can ask for one like this:

The first is that DateFormatters have historically been heavy-weight objects to create. Performance has definitely improved over the years, but if we can, it's probably a good idea to keep one around instead of creating on the fly each time we need it. (For example we wouldn't want to be creating a new DateFormatter inside a UITableView or UICollectionView"cell for row" style delegate function).